Walmart Recalls "Realistic Animals" Tainted With Lead

By consumeristcareyOctober 21, 2007

A plague of lead has stricken Walmart’s stock of “realistic animals”. Affected animals include farm animals, jungle animals, and even the feared dinosaur. The animals are currently trapped in chinsy cellophane bags clad shut by a brandless cardboard strip that proudly boasts: 88 Cents!

“Wal-Mart said independent testing revealed excessive levels of lead in the base material, not the surface coating.”

It decided to issue the voluntary recall Friday after verifying the testing and notifying the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the manufacturer, she said.

Wal-Mart believes the manufacturer has also sold the toys through other retailers. Blakley said Wal-Mart has provided the maker’s name and the test data to the CPSC and it would be up to the CPSC to work with the manufacturer to contact other retailers.

The retailer said it was posting photos and details of the affected toys on its Web site, http://www.walmartfacts.com. It said customers may return the product to any Wal-Mart store, with or without a receipt, for a full refund.

Facts not listed on WalmartFacts.com: how many realistic animals are in Walmart stores, or how long they have been stocked. One spokesman said only: “We’ve had these for a while.”

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What merchandise from Walmart ISN’T lead-tainted? Oh wait, what ISN’T tainted with lead is tainted with Ecoli, SARS, or something else. Put me in charge, Walmart will have a squeaky clean safety record….as in, every time something tainted is found in a walmart, I shut down ALL walmarts nationwide, pull ALL merchandise, and dispose of them.

Johnson & Johnson did that when one bottle of tylenol was found to have arsenic in it, by somebody INJECTING it into the bottle. They pulled ALL tylenol nationwide and disposed of it.

So, when is the government going to start suggesting that it might be a good idea to take all of our kids to be tested for lead poisoning??????? Could my 8 year old sons autism somehow be tied in with the lead on all the toys he managed to put in his mouth and chew on from the time he was a baby?

Who the he– was responsible for running the tests on all the toys coming in from China? Anyone? Oh wait, is isn’t the Governments job to protect our children from things like this, it’s their job to protect the corporations from losing any profits! Isn’t that what the lobbyists pay all those big bucks for????????

@Skyeblue (somewhat) We do NOT need a nanny government to raise our children for us, and God help us if it ever comes to that, we need corporations to take responsibility for their own actions. Accountability. We are dependent on China because people demand things to be cheaper as well as your given reason of companies seeking higher profits, but there is a very high cost for things to be cheaper. We need not to show xenophobia of all things Chinese, but to demand that these companies take responsibility for their products and ensure that they are safe for us, our children, and our pets, whatever the case may be. The cost of the products initially would rise (and they have) to reflect the new testing procedures, but you cannot get better quality for nothing, and it is foolish to think so.

Do not get me wrong here, I believe it is incredibly horrible the sheer magnitude of all the lead recalls this year, and I wonder exactly how much (assuming this problem has been ongoing for many years) lead poisoning me and my family have been exposed to. One of my pets died as a result of eating melamine-tainted food. I am quite furious at the companies for allowing this to happen, but I think that extending the reach of the government is the wrong approach. At consumer’s request, these companies should provide free lead testing for any person believed to be affected by lead poisoning. Provided this action was voluntary and not mandatory, this could also help increase the companies’ public image not as above-and-beyond, but as something they should do. If tests show that the individual was in fact harmed by lead poisoning, the company should then be held liable for damages. Except for Wal*Mart. There is a special circle of Hell reserved for their executives.

Of course, this is all in an ideal world and chances are no company would provide free lead testing AND pay damages if the individual was in fact adversely affected by lead poisoning. One can dream, though…

@SkyeBlue: Oh, and on a sidebar, crooked lobbyists like that should be permanently banned from DC. You are right that government has lost sight of individuals in favor of corporations and companies thanks to lobbyists and special interest moneys, but my main point is we don’t need more and more government regulation and oversight.

Holy crapola. I actually saw these very same dinosaurs at Wal-Mart months ago and emailed a friend and new father about them, noting that now was a great time to be a child because toys were ridiculously cheap and he should buy a bunch so I could play dinosaurs with his son next time I visit.

Crap.

Now when I visit he’s gonna ask if I want to play with his son and I’ll scream “Keep those death toys away from me!” I guess I could also warn him.

@Namilia: Corporations by their very nature are designed to limit or avoid accountability. Maybe we don’t want a nanny government to interfere in our lives, but I’m not against legislation along the lines of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, that would hold a specific person fiscally and criminally responsible for the actions (or inaction) of the company they lead. Once that CEO with the 235 million dollar golden parachute is held accountable and stands to suffer a considerable financial loss (and possible “hard” time at ClubFed) – you can bet that the crap we buy will be clean. But it’ll likely cost twice as much, if not more. Like the old adage goes: “Good, Cheap, or Fast, pick two”

My point, maybe worded wrong was NOT that we need the government to help us raise our kids. My point was that the agencies that we pay for and assume are there to watch out for the safety of products worry MORE about the companies they watch over than the people they are supposed to be safeguarding!

In the early 1980’s, while living in Hawaii, having recently given birth to my 2nd child, a girl, there was a big milk recall. They had been feeding dairy cows from plants contaminated with a chemical called Heptaclor. I drank alot of milk throughout my pregnancy. They knew the milk was contaminated for quite a while before issuing the recall. Other than my son who has the autism, out of all 5 of my children she is the only girl with medical and reproductive issues. I’ve tried to find out more information about this online but no follow-ups have ever been done as far as I know on the children who were exposed to this.

I’m sure Congress and other Governrment agencies will fake more and more concern over the issue of lead contaminated toys the closer we get to election time, but I am sure we will never know the truth about who knew what about this and when they knew it.

I think their fiduciary responsibility extends only as far as the information which is disclosed to stockholders and potential investors ie: shenanigans with the books ala Tyco/Worldcom/Apple backdating, but IANAL.

@MickeyMoo: Quite true, legislation like that would be a big help if it was enforced.

@SkyeBlue: Also true, they should be doing the job they were created to do. A similar (but not identical) story to what you are saying happened to me also in the 1980s. A dry cleaner leaked carcinogenic chemicals into the public water supply that led into a base housing division that I lived in as a toddler. However, I am not sure if it impacted me (although I’ve had more than my fair share of doctor visits). It took over TWENTY YEARS before they finally admitted to leaking the chemicals, which now contaminate the soil in that area. The cleaners are still open, and I am unsure how much or even if they were fined.

I also agree with you that congressmen and women as well as presidential candidates are going to increasingly feign concern over the contaminations the closer we come to elections.

This lead thing is getting old real fast…If people are so concerned about it then quit buying Chinese manufactured items….problem solved. Even without lead, we have some of the dumbest kids in the world so I really doubt if this upcoming generation is a little bit retarded……I doubt people will notice….forgot to add, we also have some of the fattest…….

You’re telling me a CEO has no fiduciary responsibility in regards to running the company? That’s stupid. Maybe it should. And fiduciary responsibility would dictate that the CEO do whatever he/she can to insure the safety of their customers.

This lead scare is a bunch of crap! How the heck did we all grow up without dying as a child. The lead issue was no better back then.

Wake up parents! Start supervising your children when they play and don’t let them eat their toys. Try turning off the TV and teach them to read, exercise, eat right, play socially, have manners and behave correctly in public.

You have a lot more to worry about your child’s safety than toys that may contain some lead in them.

How can you blame anything on a company that buys an item wholesale then sells it at retail. Are they supposed to inspect and test everything they carry?

Every industry (such as the toy industry) has it’s own trade associations so maybe they should come up with a plan to protect their industry.

By the way, I purchased 50 of these exact toy’s from WalMart that I donated to a toy drive outside the store. I’m am not worried one bit about the toy’s causing any problem, I’m just worried about the parent who will supervise the child who will play with the toys.

MOORIE679: “Even without lead, we have some of the dumbest kids in the world so I really doubt if this upcoming generation is a little bit retarded……I doubt people will notice….forgot to add, we also have some of the fattest…….”

I hope that comment was meant to be sarcastic but I doubt it.

Well, I guess if they are a ” bit retarted” it will make it easier to send them off to war and control them in the future.

And if they are all too fat it will come in handy so they can die sooner and not collect on all that Social Security they contribute into for 45 years!

I guess dumbing down and fattening up a population has it’s benefits after all.

The toy recalls appearing just about everyday (along with the food recalls and the baby goods recalls and theâ€¦) worry parents and cause an uproar in the press but may lead to “recall fatigue” if they continue. We will continue to worry as the storm builds and clamor for the government to “do something”. Then when something minimal is done, we will move on to something else.

What should happen is what happened after the accounting scandals a few years backâ€¦teach more ethics in biz school. This should include cross cultural ethics and marketing ethics. Having worked in the field (children’s marketing) for years I have to say we were expected to know little about child development and even less about the various nefarious ways we could injure children.

Wal-Mart believes the manufacturer has also sold the toys through other retailers

Ugh. My daughter has a boat load of these dinosaurs and one of my cats actually snuggles one of them (the cat’s weird). I don’t think we’ve ever gotten any from Wal-Mart, but that’s where my mother and father-in-law would have bought them…

No it wasn’t meant to be sarcastic….We do have the dumbest and the fattest….In terms of knowledge they are not learning squat, with the current approach that the Bush administration took we are dumbing down the education system even more, due to lack of parent supervision/involvement they are watching 10 hrs of TV a day while eating that snack pack instead of an apple or playing outside. Parents need to take responsibility, all I had growing up was a teddy bear that my grandmother made and a slingshot that my grandfather made, instead of purple discount dinosaurs we would walk to the park. Some people are going to say “ooh we don’t have grandparents to take care of the kids”, guess what my mom was a single mother that made sure she paid attention to what I was doing while working 60+hr a week in Turkey. Its easier to blame a big faceless corporation than to take responsibility. I completely agree with Bignutty by the way.

In addition I have made no reference to the war, In my opinion its a bullshit war and I know more than a couple of these kids coming back from Iraq. They did not go there by choice, one friends only way to attend college was to get into ROTC, they told him that he was going to be behind the lines, what he found out was that his job was to stick his head out of on top of a Humvee and man the machine gun during patrols. He came back and I am sure that he wishes that he was retarded so he can forget the burning smell of flesh and the faces of the poor bastards with twisted faces on the side of the road.

So cut it out, you really want the government to be involved in every single decisions you make? if thats the case then we might as well ban butter, sugar, oil, tobacco, coke, meat etc. I hope you get the point, if not go read “A Brave New World” perfectionism will never be achieved and to gun after this type of a society will result in the destruction of many things that are great about humanity.

TAKE SOME RESPONSIBILITY, YOUR KID WILL NOT BE THE EINSTEIN OR THE ROCK STAR YOU WANT HIM/HER TO BE, AND IT IS MUCH EASIER TO POINT THE FINGER.

BY THE WAY, I MET A RETARDED CUSTODIAN AND HE WAS THE HAPPIEST INDIVIDUAL I HAVE EVER MET, HIS JOB WAS TO CLEAN SH*T UP AT A FACTORY. SO STOP SEEING MENTAL RETARDATION IN SUCH A NEGATIVE PERSPECTIVE, IF GIVEN THE CHOICE I WOULD HAVE CHEWED THE SH*T OUT OF THOSE DINOSAURS TO BE AS HAPPY AS HE WAS.